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A movie you might want to avoid on a first date

"Blue is the Warmest Color," the winner of the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, features a lengthy sex scene that has sparked debate. It's been called "show-stopping." It's been dismissed as porn. It also inspired a series of op-eds in the New York Times about the line between eroticism and exploitation in cinema.

For Screen Time this week, Stephanie and Kerri talk about what's sexy in a film and why it's rare for a scene to have some sizzle.

FILMS MENTIONED ON THE AIR:

• "Don't Look Now": Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie's scene in Venice as they reconnect after losing a child.

• The Eroticism of the Waltz
There is a self-congratulatory tendency in American films to separate sex from everyday life, which usually reduces sex scenes to nude "money shots." A bad sex scene divorces eroticism from its characters' emotions while a good sex scene brings emotion into the physical act. For that reason one of the best sex scenes ever filmed occurs in Max Ophuls's "Earrings of Madame De...," in which the fully clothed waltz by Vittorio DeSica and Danielle Darrieux comes complete with their mutual erotic attraction and its palpable emotional risks. Few other sex scenes match that one sequence; it should be a case study for every filmmaker. (Armond White, in the New York Times)

• "The Earrings of Madame De..." scene where Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica waltz; unfortunately, not subtitiled in English.